Technology that has been designed for sports and other activities involving motor skills is generally dedicated to improving strength, swing, motion, balance, speed, and agility. Accordingly, for golf and other sports, swinging motion trajectory is emphasized. For the most part the focus has been on developing aids for the individual athlete to improve a particular physical skill. Relatedly, technology for hazardous or potentially jeopardizing work, such as airplane piloting, is generally directed to practice in a simulated environment. In both areas mentioned above (motor skills and dangerous or jeopardizing work) the emphasis is on the individual taking action, i.e., making movements that imitate real circumstances. The prior art related to sports and physical actions is generally aided by technology directed to biomechanics and locomotion, i.e., to executing motor skills.
There is little technology that is used for instruction or simulation in playing sports such as ice hockey. Commonplace instructional aides include stopwatches, plastic orange cones (used for skating drills), parachutes (pulled to increase leg strength), 2".times.4" boards (used for jumping in agility, speed, and balance drills), and surgical tubing harnesses (to increase strength and force the skater to skate while bent forward at the waist). None of the devices noted above provide the student with instructive and cognitive information concerning principles, tactics, maneuvers, skills and strategies used in physical activities such as playing ice hockey. In addition, these devices do not enable the player to receive quantitative feed-back concerning his/her progress in learning and mastering the cognitive aspects of the sport.